ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to 2 registered trials, which are not on this map. Cited by 103 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Computational Neuroscience of Language Processing in the Human Brain
Neurophysiological Mechanisms of Language Comprehension
Who cites it
103 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Non-literal language processing is jointly supported by the language and theory of mind networks: Evidence from a novel meta-analytic fMRI approach.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Pooled it
- Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Trial
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- Functional identification of language-responsive sensors in individual participants in MEG investigations.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Article
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- Frontal cortex organization supporting audiovisual processing during naturalistic viewing.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Spurious alignment between large language models and brains can emerge from non-robust methods and overlooked confounds.Nature communications · 2026Article
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- Evidence Against Syntactic Encapsulation in Large Language Models.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Active use of latent tree-structured sentence representation in humans and large language models.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- The Temporal Dynamics of the Labeling Algorithm During Natural Language Comprehension: Neural Evidence for Phrase Grammatical Type Generation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Neural Coding of Multiple Linguistic Components During Reading Comprehension Across Development.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- A Unified Neural Time Course for Words, Phrases, and Sentences: MEG Evidence from Parallel Presentation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Hierarchical linguistic predictions and cross-level information updating during narrative comprehension.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The cerebellar components of the human language network.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Increasing alignment of large language models with language processing in the human brain.Nature computational science · 2025Article
- Low-frequency cortical activity reflects context-dependent parsing of word sequences.iScience · 2025Article
- Cortical language areas are coupled via a soft hierarchy of model-based linguistic features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
43 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The neural processes that underlie your ability to read and understand this sentence are unknown. Sentence comprehension occurs very rapidly, and can only be understood at a mechanistic level by discovering the precise sequence of underlying computational and neural events. However, we have no continuous and online neural measure of sentence processing with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here we report just such a measure: intracranial recordings from the surface of the human brain show that neural activity, indexed by γ-power, increases monotonically over the course of a sentence as people read it. This steady increase in activity is absent when people read and remember nonword-lists, despite the higher cognitive demand entailed, ruling out accounts in terms of generic attention, working memory, and cognitive load. Response increases are lower for sentence structure without meaning ("Jabberwocky" sentences) and word meaning without sentence structure (word-lists), showing that this effect is not explained by responses to syntax or word meaning alone. Instead, the full effect is found only for sentences, implicating compositional processes of sentence understanding, a striking and unique feature of human language not shared with animal communication systems. This work opens up new avenues for investigating the sequence of neural events that underlie the construction of linguistic meaning.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.